Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840-68 (review)

172CIVIL WAR HISTORY notes also collate subsequent data on solicited appointments as well as requests for individual pardons. The advent of a new editor has not altered the outstanding quality long familiar to readers of these volumes. Indeed, the work is so exemplary that one could teach a seminar in editorial method using only this series as the required text. Because the several remaining presidential volumes will cover short segments, we cannot yet know how much reinterpretation of the long term themes of Johnson's presidency may be in order. For the moment, however, we are adding a large number of small brush strokes to an extensive canvas on which many authors have sketched. James E. Sefton California State University-Northridge Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840-68. By Grace Palladino. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Pp. 221. $26.50.) Historians have generally explained the deployment of federal troops to the anthracite region of Pennsylvania during the Civil War as interventions to quell treasonous acts by Copperheads and Molly Maguires, who attempted to thwart conscription and to disrupt the flow of anthracite to vital industries. In Another Civil War labor historian Grace Palladino disagrees. Arguing that this interpretation "makes sense" only within the limited context of the Civil War, Palladino puts forward an alternative based on the larger context of a thirty-year war between labor and capital in the anthracite region. While more than one reader will quibble about Palladino's description of labor strife as a civil war, most will accept the rest of her argument that the requests for troops were the result of "official duplicity—intentional or otherwise" among public officials in Pennsylvania, who "construed evidence of labor organization to be evidence of organized resistance to conscription." Declaring herself early to be decidedly pro-labor, Palladino chronicles the development of anthracite mining into an industry so dangerously unbalanced that laborers were forced to organize in self defense. In the early years of anthracite mining small producers and contract miners, neither in ascendency over the other, equitably mined and sold anthracite for fair wages and profits. But the coming of well-capitalized transportation companies to the industry led to fierce competition and to boombust cycles in which small producers, otherwise unable to compete, were forced into desperate measures—cutting wages, slighting safety measures, paying in scrip redeemable only in company stores selling substandard or overpriced goods. Relying upon economic analysis and careful reading of public documents, private correspondence, and newspaper reports and editorials, Palladino convincingly contrasts the different ethoi of BOOK REVIEWS173 labor and capital—operators asserting the right of capital to protect its investment by making all decisions; workers countering that the labor they invested made them partners in the enterprise. As Palladino correctly states, the earliest labor actions in the region were less about unfair wages than about unsafe working conditions and the right of labor to have an equal voice in setting work rules. In the twenty years before the Civil War—a time of price wars, overproduction, and a rapidly expanding worker pool—labor fought primarily to keep from losing ground. But when the outbreak of hostilities brought increased demand for anthracite and a significantly reduced work force, miners and laborers in the industry were better able to press their claims. This they did with reasonable success until the conscription laws of 1862 and 1863 led to widespread disaffection, especially among foreign populations, allowing public officials to connect labor unrest to draft resistance and treasonous support of the South. The evidence, Palladino demonstrates, is otherwise. In anthracite counties true draft resistance was more prevalent in farming districts than mining communities , miners typically evading the draft by escaping into the surrounding mountains. What resistance occurred seems less out of any sympathy for the South than out of disgruntlement at conscription practices by which unfairly large numbers from mining communities were mustered into service. Thoroughly researched and for the most part carefully argued, Another Civil War only disappoints in what it does not attempt to do. While appropriately attentive to the issues and examples of labor conflict and class formation, Palladino appears uninterested in the human...